Overall Summary and Ratings

It is important to realize that my ratings are derived with my specific needs and challenges as outlined above. You will note that I have rated Kubuntu / Ubuntu poorly as part of this study. If I had more available space, I am confident that I would've rated the Ubuntu family of distributions much higher.

Fedora Core: 2/10 points
http://fedoraproject.org
Advantages: Based on Red Hat which is one of the most widely accepted distributions. RPM package installation & upgrade method - one of the most widely accepted package systems.
Disadvantages: I was unable to successfully install the distribution due to hard drive space constraints. Graphic installation did not work, and I was forced to use the text mode.

Gentoo Linux: 8/10 points
http://www.gentoo.org
Advantages: Ability to maintain a small footprint while getting desired functionality. Optimized for your computer and needs. Great package/source manager (Portage). Unmatched community support and documentation. Professional looking theme sets and logos.
Disadvantages: Very slow installation due to compiling from source. Requires some prior Linux experience to properly complete installation (Example: Default installation ends at shell. It does not install Xfree86, KDE or the like which is up to the end user to install using Portage).

Kubuntu / Ubuntu: 3/10 points
http://www.ubuntu.com
Advantages: One of the easiest install routines.
Disadvantages: Fairly sizable footprint (2 gigabytes PLUS user space). Very few options for installation to minimize footprint. I was not able to get this installed successfully on my laptop.

OpenSUSE: 8/10 points
http://www.opensuse.org
Advantages: The most advanced and easiest to use installation program. It's post-install configuration utility (YAST) is one of the best. Most professional looking of distributions I tested.
Disadvantages: Community isn't very prominent. Hardware support is misleading (detected my network card, but doesn't actually support it 100%).

Vector Linux: 6/10 points
http://www.vectorlinux.com
Advantages: Small footprint (960 megabytes including KDE, GIMP and Bluefish). Simple and effective configuration tools and package management tools.
Disadvantages: Text based installation. Installation not perfect (LILO install and proc mounting troubles). Not for beginner Linux users. Small user base.

Final Decision

It was very difficult for me to come to a conclusion as to which distribution I would permanently install on my laptop. As you can see from my ratings above, I assigned the highest score (8/10) to both OpenSUSE and Gentoo. Both would have been absolutely perfect for my needs. So I had to carefully weigh the advantages of each. I really felt that OpenSUSE was the cleanest installation and the best looking. Even the boot loader looked and felt much better than Gentoo's. It had a lot of great system management tools and a solid package management system. Given better hardware, OpenSUSE would've been the ideal choice without any debates. But considering my laptop, the eye candy and management tools were not enough to pull me away from Gentoo.

As I had mentioned earlier, I was already using Gentoo on my server. I initially fell in love with Gentoo because it was so easy to maintain from a remote connection, which was very beneficial for a server. When it came to picking a distribution for my laptop, this was no longer an area of concern. It was highly unlikely that I would ever need to maintain my laptop from a remote location. Before doing this study, I was expecting to end up using a different distribution. However, I overlooked two benefits of Gentoo (or any source-based distribution) that I had previously taken for granted: It's small size and it's optimized performance. If only for these two reasons, Gentoo was the natural choice.

Conclusion

This entire study was an incredible learning experience. Not only did I find the ideal distribution for my laptop, but I was exposed to different views and different ways of doing things. For example, my new installation of Gentoo will use the ReiserFS instead of the old standard file system, ext3. I was exposed to ReiserFS for the first time with OpenSUSE, which uses the file system by default. In my opinion, I found the ReiserFS to be much faster on my ancient hard drive. I was also exposed to more modern package management systems which I hadn't used in over three years. I am happy to see the advancements that have been made in those distributions. I am confident that Linux will continue to grow in popularity and usability.

I'm glad I placed this experiment upon myself. I think that, too often, myself and others have gotten locked into a distribution that they don't know what's evolving out of the remainder of the Linux world. In the end, I ended up back with the distribution I have favored all this time. But I am much more aware of what other distributions are doing. With this knowledge and experience, I will watch as these other distributions evolve and I will likely revisit this study again and again. Now, I am much wiser and much happier that I did not blindly choose a distribution for my laptop. That said, don't take my study for grail. You should do your own evaluations before you decide which distribution is perfect for your needs.

References:

• Distrowatch.com: http://distrowatch.com
• Fedora Project Wiki: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/
• Gentoo Linux Forums: http://forums.gentoo.org
• Gentoo Wiki: http://gentoo-wiki.com
• Host AP driver for Linux: http://hostap.epitest.fi
• Linux Distribution Chooser: http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/
• OpenSUSE Wiki: http://www.opensuse.org
• "Comparison of Linux Distributions" at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Linux_distributions
• LinuxCD.org: http://www.linuxcd.org